


Liberator Rat Fanon

by hafren



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-28
Updated: 2009-11-28
Packaged: 2017-10-03 21:57:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,121
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hafren/pseuds/hafren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being an account of some hitherto unsuspected passengers aboard the <i>Liberator</i>, and of their religious observances</p>
            </blockquote>





	Liberator Rat Fanon

**Author's Note:**

> They are small, sneaky and disgusting. They are my favourite animal.
> 
> \- Herr Flick of the Gestapo ('Allo, 'Allo)

  
**1: You're Never Far from One**

  
_Set after "Cygnus Alpha" and before "Time Squad"_   


 

"What are these?" Avon straightened up, holding out his hand.

Jenna glanced at the pellets and enlightened him. "Rat droppings."

Blake frowned. "How can the _Liberator_ have rats, Jenna?"

"Never seen a ship that didn't. All those clothes came aboard somewhere, the food too. Cargo comes on, rats come on." She grinned at Blake's and Gan's disgusted faces – Avon, looking sick, had headed for the shower. "If it bothers you, just don't leave food out; it encourages them."

Thinking about that, she realised that though the hold must always have been infested, there'd been no traces on the flight deck until Cygnus Alpha. Plus she hadn't missed the studied silence from the one crewmate who hadn't freaked out. When the others were occupied, she said quietly, "Vila, if you must feed the little sods, don't do it on the flight deck".

He fidgeted guiltily. She asked curiously "You've kept them as pets, haven't you?"He nodded. "In prison. When my cellies found them, they'd kill them. Eat them too, usually." He looked miserable. "They were good company, Jenna. They're clever and affectionate. Are you going to tell the others?"

"Nah," she said, "time they got used to the real world".

  
**2: A Change of Diet**   


  


  
  
_Some time in season 2_   
  


 

"You can't do that to them!" Vila protested. "It's cruel."

"Well, at least it's natural," Jenna said, not unsympathetically. "Kinder than traps or poison. And it is necessary, Vila. The little sods are gnawing through wires; we'll wake up one day and find Zen offline. And there's no other way of getting at them in the ducts."

"Couldn't we get them out some other way?" he pleaded, "maybe use sound waves or something?"

"Why bother?" asked Avon, "when a couple of snakes can go down the ducts, dislocate a jaw and swallow them for us?" Jenna shot him a filthy look and Vila flinched.

When the two boas were unpacked, Cally gasped. Patterned in orange, brown and black, their raised scales gleamed, so like new varnish that she almost expected them to be sticky. "Why, they're beautiful!" She draped one, cool and smooth, round her neck. Avon frowned.

"We don't want them tame," he pointed out, "they're meant to hunt." Vila glanced up and put out a hand to touch the snake. Cally took it off, a little regretfully. After Avon commandeered the box and disappeared in the direction of the engineering ducts, she glanced at Vila to see how he was taking it. He looked thoughtful.

After a week, the boas were presumably still down the ducts, since nobody had seen them, but rats were as much in evidence as ever, as was Avon's temper.

"Perhaps they're ill," Cally suggested, "maybe we should entice them out and check."

"What with?" he snapped. "Their food supply is down there."

"We could try Vila's idea." Reluctantly, Avon agreed. Soon high-pitched sound was blasting down, while affronted rats in numbers came up. Vila caged them as they emerged. But of snakes there was no sign.

"Can we teleport them," Vila asked eagerly, "now they're out? I can take them down."

"Oh, all right." Avon was too baffled by the snakes' absence to care.

The bafflement ended a few hours after Vila's return, when he emerged from his cabin wearing two boas. They were slightly obese and a lot more comatose.

"What the-"

Vila managed to look simultaneously abashed and pleased with himself. "I tempted them out and tamed them. Got them to eat nicer stuff than rats. Concentrates and such."

"I don't think it's good for their health," Cally remarked.

"No, that's why I thought we should send them down too. Just not in the same place as the rats."

Avon sank his head in his hands. "I give up."

Later, in his cabin, Vila opened a cupboard and whispered "All right, lads." He took out a cage and two pairs of bright eyes gleamed at him. Vila lifted them out, smiling. Pretty as the snakes had been, he preferred something furry.

"Just don't go exploring, lads. Or lasses." That there might be one of each didn't bear thinking about. He stroked a small head with one finger, making a mental note to fit grilles to the ducts when nobody was looking.

 

  
**3: The Loneliness of Gods**

  
_Some time in season 3_   


Sometimes, when Ratgod touched their heads or put food in their cage, he spoke what she thought might be his names for them. One sounded like Whiskers, the other like Eek. But those were just meaningless sounds to them. In their own minds they were Himself and Herself, the only ones of their kind.

Once there had been many. She remembered when they lived down in the dark tunnels, the warm, reassuring smell of her own kind everywhere. Then one day, the Noise came, relentless waves of sound that got inside your blood and your nerves and forced you up, out, away from it. They had all poured out, in a terrified brown tide, climbing over each other; she had almost been trampled. But she had made it to the outside, the harsh light where the giants lived. She'd been there before, of course, scavenging for food; they all had, but they went in ones and twos. Now she saw the space full of her kind, the only time she would ever see so many at once.

She didn't know where the others had gone after that, or even whether they were still alive. But Ratgod had saved her and Himself. Ratgod was one of the feared giants; when he lifted her high in the air, close to his enormous face, she thought she would die of fright. But close up, his eyes, though so impossibly huge, were brown and twinkling, like Himself's, and she could see kindness in them.

If she had ever visualised Ratgod, it was as a bigger version of her mother; she had never thought he would look like the giants. But he fed her and Himself, kept their water fresh, let them out sometimes to run on the floor or sit on his knee while he stroked their fur and talked to them in god-language. She couldn't understand the sounds, but the gentleness in his voice carried meaning, and she knew that the creased-face and the stroking meant that they had pleased Ratgod.

She did not think much about her lost race; she had Himself to curl up with. But one day she felt a change in her body. It was like when the sound got inside her, but not an invasion. It was a stirring, a filling; though she had never felt it before, she knew what it was, as if her body remembered what had happened to her mother's body, and her mother's mother's, and all the bodies of all the Herselfs who ever lived.

She told Himself there would soon be babies and that they must leave. Himself didn't particularly see why, and she could not explain. It wasn't that she did not trust Ratgod to be kind to her babies. But the ancient impulse in her body was telling her to find her own place to have them, a place only she had chosen and claimed. If Himself did not share the impulse, his folk memory responded to its urgency in her, and next time Ratgod let them out, they went to ground under the bed and gnawed through the plastic grille over a duct.

***

Herself curled round the warm, hairless little bodies, feeling the sharp tugs of their mouths on her teats, the thud of their hearts against her own. She was one of many again; all the smell and sound and memory rushed back on her. There would be more; she and Himself would make a whole new colony, fill the cold spaces with fur, warmth, scent, the familiarity of their own kind. Her body, still tired and aching from the birth, felt a deep content.

***

Few of her kind live much over a year. But except for the giants, who were easy to avoid, there were no enemies in their territory, and Herself lived longer than most. It was when she was old, when Himself was dead and her body had stopped breeding, though its descendants had bred in many generations, that one day, scavenging in the galley, she heard the voice of Ratgod. She recalled how he had fed her; now that she was stiffer and older, food was harder to find. She came out into the open and called.

There was an exclamation; the huge hand came out of the sky and lifted her, and she looked once more into the god's face. The eyes were as brown as she remembered, and the creases that came when he was pleased. But she thought she could see pain in its lines, and his voice, when he spoke to her, sounded sad.

She wondered for the first time what it was like to be a god. She knew there were no more of the giants than there had ever been, while she was surrounded by her descendants. It seemed gods did not breed. She recalled how she had slept curled in her cage with Himself, while Ratgod, across the cabin, slept alone.

Her sight was failing with age. Ratgod's eyes were as brown and bright as ever, but then he was a god. If gods never died, perhaps they felt no urge to breed new gods.

He stroked her head and spoke again. She wished she could understand, speak to him in god-language. What a lonely thing, to be a god. She pressed her damp nose against his palm. He lowered her gently to the floor and put food in front of her. She took it in her front paws, a gesture that had always pleased him, and ate while he watched.

Her body was telling her there was another thing it wanted to do in private, something like lying down and sleeping for a long time. She cleaned her whiskers and turned away from the lonely god, hobbling back to her own territory.

 

  
**4: Goodbye And Thanks For All The Scraps**

  
_During "Terminal"_   


Vila knew it was all up with the _Liberator_ when he checked the teleport room.

The slime, or fungus, whatever was eating the ship, clung to the walls there too, but he hardly noticed it. He stared, fascinated, at the teleport bay, carpeted with rats.

He'd never realised there were so many. Sure, he'd seen one or two from time to time, after his pets escaped, and he'd fed them, when his crewmates weren't about. But now they were crammed so tightly into the teleport bay, they stood on their hind paws. It gave them an oddly human look, like so many refugees on a station platform in some ancient sepia print. They stood patiently, eerily silent.

As he watched, forgetting his own worries for the moment, one at the front shuffled forward slightly and looked straight at him. It was small and wiry, with the bright-eyed hopefulness of a born survivor.

"All right, mate," he said softly. He got one of the teleport bracelets and laid it carefully on top of the shifting wave of ratty shoulders; they were so close-packed that they bore the weight easily. He moved back to the console, set co-ordinates and pressed. "Good luck."

 

  
**Epilogue**

  
_During and after season 4_   


There were rats on the _Scorpio_ too. Vila fed them, for old times' sake, but did not give any of them names or make pets of them. Getting close to things was beginning to seem like a bad idea.

On Terminal, the links were slowly dying off, murdering each other, mostly. But the world's new inhabitants were thriving, using their native intelligence and the long folk memory of their kind to adapt to the world Ratgod had given them. It was known, for not only was it part of the memory but there were still a few individuals alive whose parents or grandparents had seen him, that Ratgod had saved the father and mother of their race and sent them all to the new world. And he would appear when they had need of him; certainly he had done before, and they believed he would again. That's what gods do.

The other rumour, and this was said to have come direct from the First Mother, no less, was that he was a giant with huge brown eyes and a face that creased when his subjects had pleased him. It was also, the memory said, a sad face, but apparently that is normal for gods, too.


End file.
